Latest iPhone OS May Cause Battery Problems; Apple Investigates

Hundreds of iPhone customers are reporting shorter battery life after upgrading to the latest iPhone OS (3.1). Apple appears to have acknowledged the issue, as the company’s help desk is contacting some affected customers to diagnose the root of the problem.

The questionnaire includes queries about possible power suckers such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and push e-mail. Question 10, for example, reads, “When you notice a power drop, does it seem to be a legitimate power drop, or rather an issue with the battery icon indicator?”

The note also contains a file that installs an unsigned profile for battery-life logging on the iPhone. If users opt to install the profile, their battery-life logs can be synced with iTunes, and they can request that those logs be sent back to Apple for inspection, according to The iPhone Blog.

Are you an iPhone user? Let us know in the poll below whether you’ve been experiencing shorter battery life since upgrading to iPhone OS 3.1, or share your anecdotes and possible solutions in the comments below.

Meanwhile, I’ll share my own experience: I haven’t been actively monitoring battery life with iPhone OS 3.1 in particular, but I have noticed some quirks with the general 3.0 OS. At one point my battery life dropped from 100 percent to 20 percent in about 10 minutes. I looked into the problem and saw reports from several users that the problem was a corrupt iTunes backup of your iPhone.

The solution? Unfortunately it involved doing a clean wipe of the iPhone, setting it up as a new device and re-synchronizing my entire iTunes library. (You can do all of this by clicking the “Restore” button in iTunes, then selecting the option to set up your iPhone as a new device. After that, all you have to do is synchronize your iTunes library.) In the course of this process I lost my entire SMS history, my voicemails and library of photos snapped with the iPhone. That sucked, but a clean restore fixed the problem.